Unfortunately for Democrats like me, it appears that the leadership of
the Democratic Party will throw out democracy and the Constitution in order to
keep the dictatorship of the courts in charge of making America over in their
utopian image.

They wouldn't feel that way if the courts weren't forcing the PC agenda
on the American people.

That's what this whole business of filibustering judicial appointments is
all about. Having shown that the courts can ram the private agenda of some
elite group down the throats of the American people, without even a nod to
democratic process, the Left now lives in terror that the Right will do the same.

Even though the "worst" that conservative judges have advocated is to
repeal the fiats of judicial dictators and return issues that were never the
courts' business to the legislature.

A party called "Democratic" should have no fear of that. Persuading the
people to elect legislators who will pursue their agenda -- isn't that what party
politics is supposed to be about?

But no, it's much easier to insist that only judges who have the approval
of left-wing law school faculties and left-wing bar associations be appointed,
and then give the judge the right to decide all matters of social law.

In fact, that's what the attempt to steal Florida for Al Gore in 2000 was
all about. The Democratic leadership didn't care diddlysquat about Al Gore.
Nor did the thousands of left-wing lawyers who flooded Florida.

They cared about having a leftist in the White House to appoint judges.

And when Bush ended up prevailing because the U.S. Supreme Court
actually voted five to four that the Florida supreme court didn't have the right
to change the laws willy-nilly in order to get the desired outcome ...

Well, judges changing laws to get the desired outcome is the only way
Democratic social-change legislation ever gets into law these days.

Most Americans -- including a good number of Democrats like me -- are
actually fed up with ignorant elitists deciding what's "good" for us and
ramming it down our throats, even though they have no evidence whatsoever
that these massive social changes will actually do what they claim.

Indeed, the opposite is the case -- we have ample evidence that most of
the Left-wing agenda has had most of the deleterious effects on our society that
more conservative people warned that it would have.

Not all that agenda was forced on us by the courts -- we chose to
embrace easy divorce ourselves, for instance -- but it is now sustained and
made legislature-proof by the courts, and the judges in many venues seem
grimly determined that if left-wing social change has been a disaster, the
solution must be to move even farther to the left.

The reason the left-wing agenda is always in danger of repeal, if the state
legislatures or Congress were not blocked by the courts, is that the consensus-building legislative process was short-circuited.

One of the glories of the American system is that most issues are not --
or were not -- federal, and therefore could be worked out piecemeal, state by
state.

Rather like the lottery issue. Most states have been persuaded to try the
lottery. But now, the last couple of hold-out states are able to see how false or
downright fraudulent all the claims of the lottery proponents are. That a
lottery is nothing but a tax on the poor that very quickly becomes like an over-aged toll road -- you have to keep charging tolls to pay the salaries of all those
toll-booth operators.

But what if lotteries had been forced on all the states at once by judicial
decree, and now the courts were forbidding any state from doing away with
their lottery? We'd never stand for it.

Except that we do stand for it, and on issues far more important than
state-sponsored gambling. Even in states where easy abortion at any point in
a pregnancy and for any reason is detested by the overwhelming majority of the
people -- and that's most states, by the way, when you ask the poll question
that way -- you can't put even the slightest limits on the "right" of women to
kill the genetically unique being growing inside her, even if it came to life
because of its mother's voluntary sexual behavior.

That's what the Democratic Party has been reduced to. In order to allow
women to kill their babies at any point up to and including birth, without the
consent of the baby's father, without regard for the baby's humanity, they will
toss out the Constitution's provision giving the President the right to appoint
federal judges.

Even now, when the Congress has passed the partial-birth abortion ban
and President Bush is bound to sign it, the Democratic Party is counting on
the federal courts to throw the law out as unconstitutional -- because it would
violate a "right" that appears nowhere in the Constitution.

Since the Left long since abandoned patriotism, considering it a
dangerous fascist mindset, and now is committed to shredding the
Constitution to allow women to evade motherhood no matter when they change
their minds, I guess all that's left for the Democratic Party to embrace is apple
pie.

And people wonder why Democrats like me have to class ourselves as
"embarrassed Democrats."

*

There are actually people saying that Hillary Clinton is the "hope of the
Democratic Party."

The hope? This woman who we know is a crook, and is only outside of
jail because her co-conspirators, mafia-style, refuse to talk?

This woman who hates the traditional American family and wants the
government to dictate how children should be raised? This woman whose book
is full of self-serving lies and who denies her hatred of traditional American
values only in order to get elected?

Sure, that's right.

She is absolutely the best hope of the Democratic Party. And here's why:

If Hillary is the Democratic nominee this year (and she is so tempted to
run), it will be a disaster. She is the easiest target of the right. She would
make George McGovern look like a real contender.

And in the ashes of the Democratic Party after her nomination swept a
veto-proof Republican majority into Congress, the rank-and-file Democrats
might actually go through some soul searching and realize that maybe, if you
want to govern America, you should try getting the consent of the people first.

Maybe the Democratic Party will abandon the strategy of ramming social
change down the throats of the people, and instead try that brand-new concept
(brand-new in Iraq, anyway) of teaching and persuading the people and
gradually bringing them to vote for the changes that you think would be good.

Maybe the Democrats will even accept the idea that sometimes the
people don't want to create your utopian vision (especially when your track
record is disastrous and your "utopias" keep looking like hell), and when they
reject your ideas, it's time to move on and look for other "good" things to
accomplish.

The Democratic Party ought to be standing as the bulwark of the little
guy against big money and rapacious free-market capitalism, here and abroad.
After all, the Republicans seem to be dominated by their own group of insane
utopians -- when they're not making huggy-huggy with all those leftover
racists from the segregationist past. (Though George W. Bush seems to be
trying to put a stop to that, at least.)

But having been captured by lunatic groups that hate marriage and
family and democracy and freedom of choice on practically every issue except
abortion, the Democratic Party has abandoned its responsibility and has
embraced the very fiscal policies that they ought to be opposing. Instead they
expend all their effort on trying to turn America into a university English
faculty, where there is no morality, no religion, no "privileged idea," only
"texts."

Those of us who are tired of the elephant footprints that Republican free-market policies are leaving all over the world have no party to turn to. Because
the Democrats are busy leaving their own elephant footprints all over the
American family.

So yes, the only hope we old-fashioned liberals have is for someone like
Hillary to lead the Democratic Party to such a debacle that a new leadership
can emerge -- one that will stand tall for freedom abroad and embrace
democracy in America as well.

Meanwhile, folks like me are reduced to calling ourselves "Tony Blair
Democrats," because even though Blair ain't perfect and he ain't American,
he's a lot better than anything we've seen in the parade of Democratic
candidates so far this year.

*

If you get a chance, look at the July/August issue of The American
Enterprise magazine. Several articles devoted to the American news media are
eye-opening even to those of us who already find the quality of American
reporting laughably bad.

Unfortunately, the leftist press never bothers to answer the very serious
charges made against them in publications like TAE -- they merely dismiss
them as part of the "vast right-wing conspiracy" that claimed that Bill Clinton
was a lying adulterer.

They never seem to notice that the "vast right-wing conspiracy" was quite
right about Bill. And it's quite right about Peter Jennings and Dan Rather and
Peter Arnett, too.

 Many people have asked OSC where they can get the facts behind the rhetoric about the war. A good starting place is: "Who Is Lying About Iraq?" by Norman Podhoretz, who takes on the "Bush Lied, People Died" slogan.